Why Trump may well lose the 2020 US election

Just how bad are things looking for Trump?

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22 May 2020

Election model predicts president will lose office in ‘landslide’ defeat in November

The model by UK-based independent advisory firm Oxford Economics uses unemployment, disposable income and inflation to forecast results - and projects that the recession resulting from the coronavirus pandemic will see the sitting president secure just
35% of the popular vote in November.

The model has predicted the winner of the popular vote in 16 of the past 18 elections - but will it prove correct this time around?

Just how bad are things looking for Trump?

Very bad indeed. According to the new model, Trump “will lose in a landslide” that represents “the worst performance for an incumbent in a century”, CNN says.

Prior to the global pandemic, the model showed the Republican leader cruising to victory with 55% of the vote, but from his current position, “it would take nothing short of an economic miracle for pocketbooks to favour Trump”, says Oxford Economics in
a report on the new analysis.

The damage to the economy will be a “nearly insurmountable obstacle for Trump come November”, the report adds.

The prediction aligns with several other major projections that also show Trump losing the upcoming presidential election to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. One such analysis, from The Economist, applied a statistical technique called “multilevel
regression and poststratification” to determine the likely winner.

The researchers drew on data from nearly 9,000 voters surveyed by YouGov in March and April, and created “predictions for over 380,000 types, one for each combination of nine different demographic and geographical factors”.

“After all the fancy maths, six months before the election, Mr Biden is six points ahead of Mr Trump,” the magazine concluded. “If the vote were held today, he would probably win.”

So is it all over for the sitting president?

Not necessarily. Models based on economic trends alone, such as the one put together by Oxford Economics, “are not political crystal balls”, and trying to apply traditional modelling during a pandemic is especially difficult, CNN says.

“Traditional models work in normal times. But we’re not in normal times right now,” Greg Valliere, chief US policy strategist at AGF Investments, told the US broadcaster.

What’s more, while polls indicate that Biden has a solid national lead, “as Hillary Clinton’s experience in 2016 shows... winning the popular vote nationwide is no guarantee of claiming the White House”, says The Times.

Could Biden’s fortunes
change?

As well as a lingering hint of scandal linked to the Ukraine inquiry that ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment, an allegation of sexual assault in hanging over Biden, which could prove costly come November.

Tara Reade, a former staffer to Biden, says that the then-senator assaulted her in the US Senate in 1993.

However, the public reaction to the allegations has been “muted”, says FiveThirtyEight.

“A Morning Consult/Politico poll of Democratic voters found that half of respondents said the allegations would have no bearing on whether they’d decide to support Biden, and 32% of Democrats said that he hadn’t behaved inappropriately at all,” the news
and analysis site reports.

In the end, it could be Biden's “penchant for blunders” that could harm him most, says Business Insider opinion columnist Michael Gordon. Republican-friendly media has questioned the would-be president’s mental capability, which makes his
sporadic public fumbles all the more damaging.

“Generally, gaffes and mistakes hurt a candidate when they play to a narrative already concerning voters,” Gordon says. “A major or sustained verbal gaffe… raises concerns about Biden’s alleged cognitive abilities.”

Will there be an election at all?

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, recently said “I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other [to holding the election this November], but right now that’s the plan”.

According to MarketWatch, “the implication was that Kushner believes someone else in the administration - perhaps the president himself - could decide to postpone the election, and that the November 3 election date is not set in stone”.

However, Vox says that the president isn’t able to change the date of an election - at least, not without the blessing of Congress.

The biggest danger to US democracy “is not that our election will be postponed”, says The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal, but rather “that access to that election will be restricted only to the people who are likely to vote for Donald
Trump”.

State governors “can restrict assembly; they can restrict travel; they can restrict the hours people are allowed outside of their homes. And they can place these restrictions on a county-by-county basis, meaning that your ability to assemble in a long
line to vote might be predicated on what community you live in,” Mystal writes.

Regardless of such concerns, Biden’s solid national lead in the polls still gives him an edge over Trump going into the last six months of the campaign.

Yet the unprecedented backdrop of the election, as the world grapples with the coronavirus crisis, means correctly guessing the final outcome has never been more tricky.

“There is no question that American politics has been turned on its head,” says Australia’s ABC News. “The effects will be widespread, long-lasting, and utterly impossible to predict.”

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Article originally published by The Week. Hargreaves Lansdown is not responsible for its content or accuracy and may not share the author's views. News and research are not personal
recommendations to deal. All investments can fall in value so you could get back less than you invest.

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